Jonathan Edwards, (born Oct. 5, 1703, East Windsor, Conn. [U.S.]—died March 22, 1758, Princeton, N.J.), greatest theologian and philosopher of British American Puritanism, stimulator of the religious revival known as the “Great Awakening,” and one of the forerunners of the age of Protestant missionary expansion in the 19th century.

Early life and ministry

Edwards’ father, Timothy, was pastor of the church at East Windsor, Conn.; his mother, Esther, was a daughter of Solomon Stoddard, pastor of the church at Northampton, Mass. Jonathan was the fifth child and only son among 11 children; he grew up in an atmosphere of Puritan piety, affection, and learning. After a rigorous schooling at home, he entered Yale College in New Haven, Conn., at the age of 13. He was graduated in 1720 but remained at New Haven for two years, studying divinity. After a brief New York pastorate (1722–23), he received the M.A. degree in 1723; during most of 1724–26 he was a tutor at Yale. In 1727 he became his grandfather’s colleague at Northampton. In the same year, he married Sarah Pierrepont, who combined a deep, often ecstatic, piety with personal winsomeness and practical good sense. To them were born 11 children.

The manuscripts that survive from his student days exhibit Edwards’ remarkable powers of observation and analysis (especially displayed in “Of Insects”), the fascination that the English scientist Isaac Newton’s optical theories held for him (“Of the Rainbow”), and his ambition to publish scientific and philosophical works in confutation of materialism and atheism (“Natural Philosophy”). Throughout his life he habitually studied with pen in hand, recording his thoughts in numerous hand-sewn notebooks; one of these, his “Catalogue” of books, demonstrates the wide variety of his interests.

Edwards did not accept his theological inheritance passively. In his “Personal Narrative” he confesses that, from his childhood on, his mind “had been full of objections” against the doctrine of predestination—i.e., that God sovereignly chooses some to salvation but rejects others to everlasting torment; “it used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me.” Though he gradually worked through his intellectual objections, it was only with his conversion (early in 1721) that he came to a “delightful conviction” of divine sovereignty, to a “new sense” of God’s glory revealed in Scripture and in nature. This became the centre of Edwards’ piety: a direct, intuitive apprehension of God in all his glory, a sight and taste of Christ’s majesty and beauty far beyond all “notional” understanding, immediately imparted to the soul (as a 1734 sermon title puts it) by “a divine and supernatural light.” This alone confers worth on man, and in this consists his salvation. What such a God does must be right; hence, Edwards’ cosmic optimism. The acceptance and affirmation of God as he is and does and the love of God simply because he is God became central motifs in all of Edwards’ preaching.

Under the influence of Puritan and other Reformed divines, the Cambridge Platonists, and British philosopher-scientists such as Newton and Locke, Edwards began to sketch in his manuscripts the outlines of a “Rational Account” of the doctrines of Christianity in terms of contemporary philosophy. In the essay “Of Being,” he argued from the inconceivability of absolute Nothing to the existence of God as the eternal omnipresent Being. It was also inconceivable to him that anything should exist (even universal Being) apart from consciousness; hence, material things exist only as ideas in perceiving minds; the universe depends for its being every moment on the knowledge and creative will of God; and “spirits only are properly substance.” Further, if all knowledge is ultimately from sensation (Locke) and if a sense perception is merely God’s method of communicating ideas to the mind, then all knowledge is directly dependent on the divine will to reveal; and a saving knowledge of God and spiritual things is possible only to those who have received the gift of the “new sense.” This grace is independent of human effort and is “irresistible,” for the perception of God’s beauty and goodness that it confers is in its very nature a glad “consent.” Nevertheless, God decrees conversion and a holy life as well as ultimate felicity; and he has so constituted things that “means of grace” (e.g., sermons, sacraments, even the fear of hell) are employed by the Spirit in conversion, though not as “proper causes.” Thus, the predestinarian preacher could appeal to the emotions and wills of men.

Pastorate at Northampton

At Stoddard’s death in 1729, Edwards became sole occupant of the Northampton pulpit, the most important in Massachusetts outside of Boston. In his first published sermon, preached in 1731 to the Boston clergy and significantly entitled God Glorifiedin the Work of Redemption, by the Greatness of Man’s Dependence upon Him, in the Whole of It, Edwards blamed New England’s moral ills on its assumption of religious and moral self-sufficiency. Because God is the saints’ whole good, faith, which abases man and exalts God, must be insisted on as the only means of salvation. The English colonists’ enterprising spirit made them susceptible to a version of Arminianism (deriving from the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius), which was popular in the Anglican Church and spreading among dissenters; it minimized the disabling effects of original sin, stressed free will, and tended to make morality the essence of religion.

Against these ideas Edwards also delivered a series of sermons on “Justification by Faith Alone” in November 1734. The result was a great revival in Northampton and along the Connecticut River Valley in the winter and spring of 1734–35, during which period more than 300 of Edwards’ people made professions of faith. His subsequent report, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), made a profound impression in America and Europe, particularly through his description of the types and stages of conversion experience.

In 1740–42 came the Great Awakening throughout the colonies. George Whitefield, a highly successful evangelist in the English Methodist movement, and Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey, drew huge crowds; their “pathetical” (i.e., emotional) sermons resulted in violent emotional response and mass conversions. Edwards himself, though he held his own congregation relatively calm, employed the “preaching of terror” on several occasions, as in the Enfield sermon,“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741).

The Awakening produced not only conversions and changed lives but also excesses, disorders, and ecclesiastical and civil disruptions. Though increasingly critical of attitudes and practices associated with the revival, to the extent of personally rebuking Whitefield, Edwards maintained that it was a genuine work of God, which needed to be furthered and purified. In defense and criticism of the Awakening he wrote The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742), and A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746).

In the Affections, Edwards insisted, against the revival critics’ ideal of sober, “reasonable” religion, that “the essence of all true religion lies in holy love,” a love that proves its genuineness by its inner quality and practical results. In 1749 he edited, with “Reflections,” the memoirs of David Brainerd, a young New Light revivalist who became a Presbyterian missionary to the Indians and died in 1747. The volume became a highly influential missionary biography. Edwards’ Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer (1747), written in support of a proposed international “concert of prayer” for “the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth,” helped to remove a major ideological barrier to missionary activity by arguing that the worst of the “great tribulations” (prophesied in the book of Revelation to John as preceding the millennium) were already past and that the church could thus look forward to an increasing success of the gospel among men.

Dismissal from Northampton.

Meanwhile, Edwards’ relations with his own congregation had become strained; one reason for it was his changed views on the requirements for admission to the Lord’s Supper. In the Halfway Covenant, baptized but unconverted children of believers might have their own children baptized by “owning the covenant”; Stoddard had instituted the subsequently widespread practice of admitting to the Eucharist all who were thus “in the covenant,” even if they knew themselves to be unconverted. Edwards gradually came to believe that the profession required for admission to full communion should be understood to imply genuine faith, not merely doctrinal knowledge and good moral behaviour.

The public announcement of his position in 1749 precipitated a violent controversy that resulted in his dismissal. On July 1, 1750, Edwards preached his dignified and restrained “Farewell-Sermon.” In the course of this controversy he wrote two books, Qualifications for Communion (1749) and Misrepresentations Corrected, and Truth Vindicated, in a Reply to the Rev. Mr. Solomon Williams’s Book (1752), one to convince his congregation, the other to correct what he considered misrepresentations of his views by a kinsman, the pastor at Lebanon, Conn. Though Edwards himself was defeated, his position finally triumphed and provided New England Congregationalism with a doctrine of church membership more appropriate to its situation after disestablishment.

In 1751 Edwards became pastor of the frontier church at Stockbridge, Mass., and missionary to the Indians there. Hampered by language difficulties, illness, Indian wars, and conflicts with powerful personal enemies, he nevertheless discharged his pastoral duties and found time to write his famous work on the Freedom of Will (1754). The will, said Edwards, is not a separate, self-determining faculty with power to act contrary to the strongest motives, as he understood the Arminians to teach. Rather, it is identical with feelings or preference, and a volition is simply the soul’s “prevailing inclination” in action; the will “is as the greatest apparent good.” Men are free to do as they please, and God therefore rightly holds them morally responsible for the quality of their volitions as expressions of their desires and intentions.

By 1757 Edwards had finished his Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758), which was mainly a reply to the English divine John Taylor of Norwich, whose works attacking Calvinism (based on the thought of the 16th-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin) had “made a mighty noise in America.” Edwards defended the doctrine not only by citing biblical statements about the corruption of man’s heart but also by arguing that the empirical evidence of men’s universal commission of sinful acts points to a sinful predisposition in every man. In answering Arminian objections to the notion that God “imputed” Adam’s guilt to his posterity, Edwards proposed a novel theory of identity by divine “constitution” to account for men’s unity with Adam and suggested that their innate corruption is not a judicial punishment for Adam’s guilt but is really their own because of their participation (being one with him) in the sinful inclination that preceded Adam’s sinful act. Edwards’ was the first major contribution to the long debate about human nature in American theology and helped set the terms of that debate.

Edwards perceived the threat in Taylor’s notion of man’s innate goodness and autonomy; the whole Christian conception of supernatural redemption seemed to be at stake. He therefore planned further treatises, of which he completed two posthumously published dissertations: Concerning the End for Which God Created the World and The Nature of True Virtue (1765). God’s glory, not human happiness, is his end in creation; but this is because God in his all-sufficient fullness must communicate himself by the exercise of his attributes. God can be said to aim at the creature’s happiness, but it is a happiness that consists in contemplating and rejoicing in God’s glory manifested in creation and redemption. Edwards defines true virtue as disinterested love (benevolence) toward God as Being in general and toward all lesser beings according to their degree of being. True virtue, therefore, does not spring from self-love or from any earthbound altruism (two prime 18th-century views); love to self, family, nation, or even mankind is good only if these lesser systems of being do not usurp the place of highest regard that belongs to God alone.

Edwards also projected books on other subjects, notably A History of the Work of Redemption (he had preached a series of sermons—posthumously published—on that subject in 1739), which was to be a complete theology combining biblical, historical, and systematic materials “in an entire new method.” Late in 1757, however, he accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) and arrived there in January. He had hardly assumed his duties when he contracted smallpox and died.

Influence

Edwards’ immediate disciples, Joseph Bellamy (pastor at Bethlehem, Conn.), Samuel Hopkins (pastor at Great Barrington, Mass., later at Newport, R.I.,), and Jonathan Edwards, Jr., developed some of his “improvements” into a distinct theological school; it was first called “Hopkinsianism” and later the “New England Theology.” These men and their successors, in their effort to defend Calvinism against Arminians, Unitarians (those who denied the doctrine of the Trinity), and “infidels,” made important modifications in some of its doctrines and thus prepared the way for later 19th-century evangelical liberalism.

Edwards’ influence on the intellectual character of American Protestantism for a century after his death was very pronounced, and he was widely read in the British Isles. In a general revolt against Puritanism and Calvinism after the U.S. Civil War (1861–65), Edwards’ prestige declined, and he was remembered mainly as a hell-fire preacher or as an abstruse, absent-minded metaphysician. In the 1930s and after, he was rediscovered by theologians reacting against liberalism and by secular scholars seeking to delineate the “American mind.” Edwards’ ability to combine religious intensity with intellectual rigour and moral earnestness, the cosmic sweep of his theological vision, his emphasis on faith as an “existential” response to reality, his insistence that love is the heart of religion, and his uncompromising stand against all forms of idolatry are some of the reasons his life and writings are again being seriously studied.

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